


the days we saw

by petraquince



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Animal Death, Cats, Concentration Camps, Dark, Gen, Holocaust, Shaw Being Evil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-05
Updated: 2014-11-05
Packaged: 2018-02-24 04:11:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2567759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petraquince/pseuds/petraquince
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death was in his mouth. The clinging taste of human ash from the camps never left him, no matter what. It’s in the back of his throat, it’s in the caramel stuck to his molars years later, it’s in the saliva that wells up inside his cheeks.<br/>Death was everywhere.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the days we saw

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize for the angelic references in a piece told from a Jewish point of view. Clearly, I’ve been watching too much Supernatural. This is not really canon, I'm not sure what camp Erik was at so I'm pretending, and what I know about concentration camps comes from reading Elie Wiesel. There's bound to be a lot of errors, and if parts of it offend, please let me know how I can fix them.

_ I shall always remember that smile. From what world did it come from? -- Elie Wiesel,  _ Night

__

Death was in his mouth. 

The clinging taste of human -- _human,_ dear God -- ash from the camps never left him. Years later, it still remains, no matter how many glasses of scotch he downs, or how many cocks he sucks. It’s in the back of his throat, it’s in the caramel stuck to his molars, it’s in the saliva that wells up inside his cheeks.

Death was everywhere. 

 

The crunch as he accidentally bit down on that piece of char that one time, and the soft sound that followed, and the horror when the center was more pliable than the outer shell. It was awful: a pervasive filth that never left, staining hands and faces sepulchral black.

It filled the air, day in and day out. Only the rain cleared it, but then it mingled with the mud so you just _walked_ through your loved ones instead of _ingesting_ them.

It especially clung to Erik, he of the lost family, he of the magnetic heart (the residual bits of iron in the residual bits of blood were attracted to him, even though he didn’t understand it at the time).

The terror, the revulsion -- when the black things caught, and no matter how many times he retched or scrubbed with his fingers, they wouldn’t come out. He watched the others around him sob like the world was ending and felt like joining in, only --

Only, they mourned that they weren’t chosen along with the rest of the mothers and fathers, the children and infirm. They sobbed like Lucifer himself had passed them by and _not_ touched their foreheads, like they actually mattered. Their tears wicked trails through the goddamn, ever present soot like little falling angels trailing fire.

That’s all they were. Little tears on the face of society. Easily ignored, easily wiped away. Shuffled into a dank, dark corridor of hell, and left to rot.

Erik cried his tears out of hatred.

Nobody mattered.

 

He can’t remember the last time he laughed. Really laughed, not just the acrimonious burble that fools no one, that one that scares the guards. Especially when their enameled swastikas chuckle too, the metal pins rattling in the lapels of their big black coats.

Every time someone who isn’t Shaw decides to rattle the bars of his cage, he bares his teeth. Like some animal. Then he snarls.

Let the world see what they already think he his. Let the world see what they’ve made him into. 

The weeks begin to slide together, one big amalgamation of filth and pain.

It never ends. 

 

 One day, Erik found that one of the camp ratters had, for some unfathomable reason, chosen to have its kittens in his blanket ( _rag_ ).

_Literally_ , had kittens. Not figuratively: literal, living kittens. The mother is likely the best fed in the entire compound, sleek and smug, a pale cream color. It was also ostensibly the nastiest creature there -- with the exception of Schmidt: even the guard dogs suckled on Jewish blood and all named Blondie after the _führer’s_ shied away from it.

But the kittens are small and perfect, all five of them in an ombre of shades of ginger and tabby, with fluffy fur. Something long locked away in his chest stirs quietly when he extends a shaking finger to stroke the largest one carefully. The ensuing retribution dealt out by the mother is the best pain he’s felt -- righteous and with purpose and, for once, understandable.

There is something deeply resonant in these interactions, and deeply wrong about the presence of new life in such a place.

The boy and the cat come to an uneasy agreement of sorts. He brings them water, they provide company when he crawls back onto his pallet like a beaten dog for scant hours respite.

Of course, nothing gold can stay.

 

_Der gute Doktor_ finds them a few months (months? Or has it been years, it _feels_ like years dragged through tar) later: it is a miracle they lasted that long at all.

He starts with the largest one, a beatific smile stretching out on his face and doing uncanny things to the shadows pooling around him. He scratches its little ears (Misha, after the Russian who used to give Erik his rations because he knew he was dying of something food just prolonged). He listened to the raspy purr that was the closest thing to happiness the boy knew, and snapped its neck while Erik looked on in horror with a freshly wrung wrist, in the corner like a forgotten ghost.

One hand over the body, large fingers curling over it, while the other wrenches the neck around with a sick crack.

 

No.

No, no, no,  _no, no_. Please, _please_ , God.

This is _wrong_ , this is so _unspeakably_ wrong, how did this ever happen, what passive fools waited so long, too long --

One by one, each kitten is snuffed from this earth with little mewling cries (first Misha, then Chava, Dinah, Aleksandr and little Ivan), and by the end, Erik is crying harder for them than he ever did for his father or his neighbors.

Schmidt tsked, cupping Erik’s cheek in a paternal, possessive manner that was sickening to behold. “ _Ah, kleine Erik, zu weich in sind Sie hier.”_

He pressed at Erik’s mountainously ridged sternum, then slapped him hard across the face until the boy saw stars and galaxies and entirely new fucking universes being born right before his eyes. The man left the cell, shucking off his bloodied gloves as he walked, the cell door locked behind him. He did not look back. The guards that trailed him did, and even they looked a little sickened.

His cell is made almost entirely of metal because Erik is still weak.

 

The cat returned from her hunting later, thin enough to slide through the bars because the pickings were growing slim. Even the rats were starving. She found the human cradling her dead offspring, and stopped short. Erik watched her little face like someone who was desperate to be converted into righteousness.

Confusion, then a deep emptiness welled up in her yellow lantern eyes as she nudged at one of the cold little corpses. That night was the one time she let Erik Lehnsherr pick her up and cuddle with her.

And they say animals do not feel. Real animals, not monsters created with pliers and vises and needles in laboratories like Erik was.

The cat disappears the next sunrise: nothing gold, and all.

 

He doesn’t even know.

He doesn’t even know how he gets out, or what year it is. All he knows is that Shaw left for Austria (and a boy he called _Ariel_ ) just the other day. Or was it two days ago?

But something clicked in his wearied mind and now the metal braced walls of the compound bend like dough in his hands, and the coin rattled in his threadbare pocket as he slipped away. Past the guards who did not see him by some trick of fate; past the dogs who did not smell him because there was a cat taunting them and that was infinitely more interesting than some scrawny Jew.

He slipped into the shadows, and limped for miles and miles until his feet bloodied the ground behind him. It was early summer in Poland, just starting to be warm enough to be a nuisance. He passed empty houses, charred husks, gaudy signs declaring tiny hamlets _Judenrein_. He is the only living thing for miles around

He tilted his head back to feel the sun for the first time in ages, closing his eyes and breathing in the free, clean air for the first time but all he can think is _revenge_. If he is the only living thing, the only thing that remains to hope, then there is none left at all. 

**Author's Note:**

> References/Translations:  
> 1\. Nothing gold can stay -- Robert Frost, The Outsiders, what have ye.  
> 1.5. Chava from the Golem and the Jinni, Dinah from The Red Tent  
> 2\. Ah, little Erik, you are too soft in here.  
> 3\. Ariel = Riptide -- reference to The Tempest  
> 4\. Judenrein is “free of jews”.


End file.
